After Apple announced it would offer customers replacement batteries for the iPhone 6S batch that randomly shuts off, the company now knows why the problem occurred: Air. Specifically, ambient air a crucial battery component was exposed to for too long.

Mac: Spark, one of our favourite email apps for iPhone and iPad, has made the jump to Mac. Now you can use all of your custom filters, gestures and smart notifications on your laptop or desktop — and it's still free.

The smartphone you use everyday is a complex machine that is made up of a number of different components. But when you break it down, there are around 75 elements - that's two-thirds of the periodic table - that go into the creation of a smartphone. Some of these elements are extremely prevalent while others are exceptionally rare. Why does this all matter? Let's find out.

The problem with investing in smart, connected devices like Wi-Fi colour-changing light bulbs, internet-enabled power strips and wearables like Fitbits is that you need a dozen apps for them all. Stringify is an iPhone app (Android is on the way) that links all of it together. Imagine it: One app to manage them all, one app to automate them. Here's how to set it up.

Some iPhone users have received text messages, purportedly from Apple, that claim their AppleID has been disabled. There's a dubious link in the text that implores users to click it to unlock their accounts. We've confirmed that the link is malicious. Here's what we know.

If you have an Apple iPhone or iPad running iOS 8, 9, 10 and above, there is a way to gain access to the photos and contacts on your device without unlocking it with a passcode or fingerprint ID. The security flaw makes use of Siri voice commands. It's a bit finicky, but you don't have to be a genius-level hacker to exploit the vulnerability. Here are the details.

iOS: Apple recently introduced a new Portrait Mode that adds a faux depth-of-field effect when you take a photo, but it only works on the iPhone 7 Plus. With Patch, you can get a similar effect on any iPhone.

iOS: iOS 10's "Raise to Wake" feature is great, but it's a little finicky. How-To Geek flipped an iPhone around for a while to figure out the best way to make it actually work consistently and found two different methods.

Smartphone battery life sucks and carrying power banks around with you is one way to keep your handset juiced up. But it's easy to forget to bring a power bank or to charge them up to take with you in the first place. This contraption that you can build yourself could be a good alternative to keep your phone charged up, albeit at the expense of your friends' handsets' battery life.

iOS: Whether you're travelling for work and just need to find spot to plug in your laptop or you're a full-time digital nomad, Workfrom highlights the best spots near you for remote work. Now they have a mobile app to make it easier while you're on the go.

Windows/Mac: If you want to move a file, whether it's a video, ebook, ringtone or whatever else, from your computer to your iPhone, you'd usually need to use iTunes. Waltr allows you to skip iTunes, or skip wires altogether.

iOS: Podcasts are great, but the effort required to pick one out and play it is a little obnoxious sometimes. 60db is a new app that helps with that, focused on short-form podcasts from a variety of providers.

iOS: Image annotation is one of those surprisingly useful tools on your iPhone, and while there's a built-in option with iOS, you can't do much with it. Annotable offers a ton of features for easy image markup.

For some reason, iOS 10's Mail app changed how email threads work. Now, the oldest message appears at the top, which doesn't really make sense for most of us, unless you really love scrolling through large blocks of text for fun. Macworld shows off how to fix it.

iOS: LowRes Coder is a fun app that lets you craft your low-resolution, pixelated games that resemble arcade favourites of yore. It uses the classic BASIC programming language to bring your games to life.

This is what male staff at an Apple store in Queensland have allegedly been caught doing red-handed. If the reports are true, they also stole explicit selfie photos from customers' phones and rated those too. Needless to say, the culprits have been promptly fired by Apple. Good. Riddance.